RuneScape is one of the most addictive MMORPGs on the internet. Too bad that's almost all it has in its favour.
Unfortunately, once you break the chains of addiction, you realize exactly how horrible RuneScape really is. Having played this trainwreck of an MMORPG for three and a half years before finally quitting, I am left wondering what sucked me in for such a length of time.
As mentioned above, the game lures players in with simple, easy to learn gameplay. In fact, it's so simple that I wouldn't be surprised if a three year old could learn to play RuneScape efficently. With few exceptions, you click on an object or piece of land, and watch as your character preforms an animation loop while something happens appropiate to the skill in which you're leveling. And that's the majority of the gameplay. Unlike the majority of online games out there, there is almost no strategy, and even less real life skill, in RuneScape's gameplay.
Making matters worse, most of the games 24 (as of this review) skills play out very similarily, which adds to the addictive monotony. Ultimately, you could divide the skills into five categories of gameplay: Combat, Running from Point A to Point B, Clicking and Waiting, Rapid Clicking, and Agility.
The combat system in this game is, for lack of a better word, broken. After clicking an opponent, you wait as you and your opponent take turns attacking each other, with minimal player input (in fact, hits and misses are, with the exception of boosts from certain prayers and from stats, completely decided by luck). Aside from eating food (to restore health-- more on this later), drinking potions, activating prayers, and running away, you spend time in combat waiting for your opponent to die. After they die, you collect their drops manually, then click another enemy and repeat the process all over again.
Adding to this mess of a combat system is a hideous amount of game balance issues. Most NPC enemies even 20-30 levels above you will drop with minimal difficulty. In fact, you will likely be able to down anywhere from 40-50 enemies in one inventory of food. Adding to this is the ridiculously overpowered Prayer system. After training the Prayer skill (one of the Rapid Clicking skills), you gain "Prayer Points". Upon activating one of the prayers (some of which can make you temporarily invincible to a large portion of the entirety of RuneScape's NPCs), your PP slowly drains. You can deactivate the prayers at any time, but you rarely will need to before the monster is dead. Making matters worse is that some equipment slows the rate of the PP drain-- which means that against some monsters, it's best to equip low defense armours that slow PP drain, because you'll be invincible regardless. Seeing how Prayer can be recovered easily and painlessly by praying at a strategically placed Altar or by drinking certain potions, Prayer comes into play far too frequently.
PvP is also a mess. The three types of combat (Melee, Ranged, and Magic) are ridiculously out of balance-- Certain Magic spells can essentially end the fight right then and there, while others can immobilize their opponent for a ridiculously long amount of time. Melee fighters have significantly more powerful armour and weaponry than the other classes of fighters, and can often obliverate their opponent in a couple hits. Rangers can hit insanely fast and with fairly high accuracy and damage, as well. The effect of Prayer is greatly diminished against a human opponent (prayers that would grant players invincibility against certain forms of attacks against NPC reduce the power of that form of attack from a human opponent by 15% and give them a 50% defensive boost to that form of attack), but the effect is still far too great-- a player without Prayer will almost certainly die against one who can use the higher level Prayers. Additionally, a recent update that allows players to use certain unbalanced untradable potions (provided they can make them with a high enough Herblore level-- this is another Rapid Clicking skill), there is yet another mandatory strategy for survival that leaves certain players out in the cold.
Due to the luck based combat system, PvP is broken even further. Players could possibily kill players even 30 levels above them provided luck is in their favour. This also makes running/teleporting away much more lucrative, because there is a good chance that they'll make it to someplace safe before they die. Additionally, this means that a single player fighting against a group will almost certainly die-- and seeing how cowardice and outnumbering are the name of the game in RuneScape's PvP, players who want to fight honourably and solo stand almost zero chance of survival.
Breaking this system even further is an absurd balance between offense and defense. A player's health level is trained the same way, with the same EXP requirements and the same boosts, as any other skill, and is one of the slowest trained skills in the entire game (while other combat skills offer 4 EXP for every point of damage dealt in their combat style, HP only recieves 1.33 EXP for every point of damage dealt). This means that overpowering players is by far the best combat strategy, as higher level hits can often slice up to a quarter to even a half of even the strongest player's HP in one shot. The obscene accuracy bonuses of most weapons can decimate the defensive bonuses of most of the armours in the game (unlike most games with armour, defense does not reduce the amount of damage a player takes-- it only decreases the odds of taking damage).
The other skills don't play out much better, unfortunately. Higher skill levels often only mean a slightly increased speed of collecting the resources collected in the skill (for instance, collecting logs from the Woodcutting skill), or collecting a higher level of that resource (for instance, being able to cut Yew logs by cutting Yew trees)-- unfortunately, collecting higher level resources is often slower EXP over time than cutting lower level ones.
Additionally, most skills are an exercise is repetition. Woodcutting and Fishing, for instance, boil down to clicking a resource pool with an axe or fishing tool in hand, waiting until the resource dies out, then finding a new pool while waiting for that pool to respawn. Once your ridiculously tiny inventory is full (you can only carry 28 items, and very few items stack into one inventory space, such as coins or runes), you return to a bank to deposit your resources, then return to the resource pools. Skills like Summoning and Runecrafting involving going from a bank to a special altar of some kind with a certain type of resource in your inventory, then using the resources and returning to the bank to collect more of this resource before repeating the process. These types of skills are horrendously boring, even more so than the other skills, and make for some of the game's worst moments. Then there's skills like Firemaking and Prayer, which involve clicking items in your inventory to use them. This quickly hurts the wrist, and longterm use will likely lead to Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. You'll never leave the area of the bank to train these skills, either, so they get boring very, very quickly. Finally, a skill that deserves special note is Agility-- which really picked the wrong game to manifest in. Agility ultimately involves making your character run through a set obstacle course, in which, you guessed it, you click obstacles and watch as your character tries to avoid them. Making matters worse for all skills is how long it takes to gain levels in them-- after reaching roughly level 30 in a skill, the EXP requirements grow exponentially, doubling every seven levels. By the 70-80 level range, you'll be required to gain around a hundred thousand EXP to level up. Additionally, the experience remains the same from every type of resource, regardless of level, meaning that gaining a single skill level can take a few days to even weeks.
The community is also terrible. Most of the population rarely speaks beyond insults, spam, begging, or telling you to "get off" their resource. There are some nice clans and players out there, but they are definitely diamonds in the rough, and there is quite a bit of rough to sort through. Additionally, most people who want to become your friend either stop talking to you roughly two hours after you add them to your friends list, or do nothing more than beg from you.
Graphically, the game is a mixed bag. The game looks really nice for a game programmed in Java, and it definitely looks alot better than some of the 2D (MMO)RPGs on the Internet. However, compared to other 3D MMORPGs, it looks pretty bland-- particularly the character models (while some of the scenary is rather nice, alot of the character models, especially the player characters, look like they've been whacked a few times with the ugly stick) Additionally, the game causes a fair bit of lag to those with slower computers or internet connections, and the lag can prove fatal to your character.
Finally, the balance between free players and members is horrendous. While free players in RuneScape do admittedly get a lot more than free players in most online games, free players are often shunned by Jagex and by the paying community-- in fact, while members often get an update every week, free players often only get one every couple of months. Then again, considering how horrible the updates really are (especially the ones that do affect free play), that might not be a bad thing. Membership is rather cheap compared to the competition, at roughly $6.50 a month, but this is a game that is really not worth paying for.
Ultimately, RuneScape is a very lackluster game, and there are definitely better games out there that are a better use of your free time. For those of you who haven't played this game yet, I implore you to look away-- this highly addictive mess is not worth being sucked into.